Champagne Cocktail

Ingredients

sugar cube

3 dashes Bitters -- bitters

Brut champagne

twist of lemon(s)

Collins glass

Instructions:

Place a sugar cube* in a chilled champagne flute, lash it with 2 or 3 dashes of bitters (Angostura or Peychaud's), fill the glass with brut champagne or other, cheaper, bubbly (peasant!), and squeeze a lemon twist on top.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Some prefer an ice cube in theirs, which will (to state the obvious) prolong the chill at the cost of a certain dilution. But if you're taking the sensible, economic route, chill and dilution are just the things you want -- although if cheap bubbly's the only option, rather than pussyfooting around with one of these, we'd rather go all-out with one of these. Or you can replace the bitters with absinthe and float a tablespoon or so of cognac (good cognac) on top. That's called a Casino Cocktail. We don't know which casino it was named after, but you can be sure it ain't Foxwoods -- and not just because it predates the Wonder of It All by fifty-odd years.

* The standard 1/2 teaspoon size. Don't use loose sugar or try to crush the cube -- the whole point isn't so much to sweeten the drink as to create bubbles, which the cube will do as it slowly dissolves.

The Wondrich Take:

The Champagne Cocktail, aka "Chorus Girl's Milk," dates from the Iron Age of American mixology -- that final prehistoric period between the invention of the cocktail, whenever that was, and 1862, when the first cocktail book was published. What's more, practically alone among all the cocktails, punches, smashes, juleps, flips, cobblers, and suchlike collected by "Professor" Jerry Thomas for his Bon Vivant's Companion, the Champagne Cocktail has come down to us unchanged. If age, authority, and persistence are the signature traits of royalty, it is the King of Cocktails.

And yet its reign has not been a peaceful one. There are factions. Whigs and Tories, Republicans and Royalists, Democrats and Republicans, call 'em what you will. The case for the opposition has never been more eloquently stated than by David Embury, the dean of postwar mixologists: "From every point of view, other than cost, this cocktail is a decidedly inferior drink, and no true champagne lover would ever commit the sacrilege of polluting a real vintage champagne by dunking even plain sugar -- much less bitters -- in it. So if you must...serve this incongruous mess just for the sake of 'putting on the dog,' then, in the name of all that a true lover of the grape holds sacred, use a cheap domestic champagne or even an artificially carbonated white wine."

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

On the other hand, there's Lorelei Lee: "So we came to the Ritz Hotel and the Ritz Hotel is devine [sic]. Because when a girl can sit in a delightful bar and have delicious champagne cocktails and look at all the important French people in Paris, I think it is devine."

Now, it's true Anita Loos might conceivably have meant Gentlemen Prefer Blondes as satire, and Lorelei as a scathing indictment of the morals and mores of the Modern American Girl, vintage 1925. But be honest, would you rather be committing sacrilege with the Lorelei Lees of this world or respecting the sanctity of the grape with the David Emburys? Exactly. Sure, Embury's right, in a narrow, cheese-paring sort of way. But what do kings care about economy, taste, common sense? So g'ahead. Use that Dom Perignon 1990, that Pol Roger, that Jean-Paul Gaultier-corseted bottle of Piper Heidsieck. Muck it up with bitters and sugar and lemon peel, so what. Don't expect it to taste like anything -- "Kings torture those they would befriend with wine" as the Roman poet Horace says -- but that's really not the point, is it?

A Part of Hearst Digital Media
Esquire participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means we may get paid commissions on editorially chosen products purchased through our links to retailer sites.